In the Multi-Cloud Era, Cloud Cost Optimization is an Engineering Problem

A key technology trend we’ve seen recently in enterprise organizations is the increasing adoption of multiple cloud environments — combining on-premises private clouds and public cloud services. IDC predicts that “by 2020, over 90% of enterprises will use multiple cloud services and platforms.” We have a prediction too: that a lot of these enterprises are in for a rude shock—a cloud cost shock.

Multi-cloud adoption has made it harder to properly predict cloud spend. The benefits of using multiple private and public cloud platforms seem to be obvious when you start the journey – meeting diverse IT needs, avoiding vendor lock-in, right cloud for the right application, etc. However, some of the harsh truths of a multi-cloud environment only start to hit home when the monthly bills start to come in. Cost optimization and containment become top priorities for enterprises if they want to truly utilize multi-cloud benefits. But whose problem is it anyway? Traditional IT admins, finance or cloud infrastructure and operations teams…who is really responsible for keeping cloud spending in check?

Traditionally, engineering teams have had to create large capital expenditures (CapEx) justifications for the purchase of on-premises hardware and software. Without a crystal ball to help them, they had to predict the outcomes of a technology investment in clear financial terms for a period of several years. The advent of multi-cloud environments enables IT teams, to balance CapEx spending and infrastructure consumption on-premises versus OpEx spending in the cloud. This turns multi-cloud cost into something potentially unexpected: an engineering problem.

Cloud cost optimization – a cloud engineer’s responsibility

Financial Modeling of Cloud Based Technology Costs

Multi-cloud cost optimization has created a shift in the way IT teams think about technology costs. In a world of unlimited resource capacity that can be made available and scaled up with a single click, it can be difficult to predict or control OpEx spending on cloud consumption. Variability in the use of cloud computing resources has pushed ownership of cloud cost management onto engineering teams, making them fully accountable for what they consume. It’s not a buffet where you can help yourself freely and someone else picks up the tab; engineering teams need to plan for and be accountable for the cloud resources they consume.

As multi-cloud adoption increases, the skills and time involved in cloud cost optimization continue to grow. Unused public cloud instances or workloads running in the public cloud that are better suited for private cloud can result in large, unnecessary costs that could then start to weigh on the company’s bottomline. Cloud operations teams may be unable to avoid cloud wastage without tools that help them analyze data granularly, identify the cost drivers quickly and make intelligent recommendations to right-size cloud resources.

Save and reserve: Engineering teams must track usage and expenditures to optimize cloud costs. Beam provides cloud operators with tools and controls to track cloud spend, and provides recommendations for cloud cost savings across public and private cloud environments.

Budget and chargeback: It’s a difficult animal to track cloud costs when users can simply swipe a credit card with no controls or tracking. With Beam, you can monitor and control multi-cloud resource consumption across departments, business groups, or even projects, and enforce policies based on allocated budgets.

Forecasting and trend reporting: Engineers and IT teams need trendline data to forecast their cloud usage and make informed choices about each new project and application. Beam utilizes machine intelligence to evaluate alternatives and provides recommendations based on usage and growth patterns.

Cloud Cost Optimization with Multi-Cloud Governance

In a multi-cloud world, managing cost becomes just another engineering problem to be optimized. Beam provides the business-level insights necessary to deliver both governance and cloud cost savings. With granular, multi-cloud visualization, your teams can identify cost drivers and optimize cloud decisions for each business unit—and your entire organization.

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